We Need a Socialist Congressional Caucus
· Jacobin
With last night’s election results, it’s official: after new members are sworn in this coming January, socialists will hold more seats in Congress then they ever have in US history.Six freshmen congress members backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York, Chris Rabb of Philadelphia, Melat Kiros of Colorado, Donavan McKinney of Michigan, and Angela Gonzales-Torres of Los Angeles — are joining fellow DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the House of Representatives. Counting also Sen. Bernie Sanders, long a self-described democratic socialist though not officially affiliated with DSA, the United States will have nine socialist members of Congress.The new socialist legislators, all of whom ran on the Democratic Party ballot line, can be expected (like Tlaib, AOC, and Sanders) to caucus with the Democrats. Despite achieving a meaningful beachhead in the legislature and being joined by left-populist allies like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson, socialists will still be a tiny minority within the Democratic caucus.The growing left wing will have to figure out how to coordinate effectively with each other while operating within the “big tent” of the larger congressional party. That party is full of members committed to pro-corporate and militarist agendas, and avowed anti-socialists Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are likely to be its leaders. The socialist legislators, on the other hand, have their own policy priorities and were elected in large part because of their criticisms of the party establishment: for failing to address the cost-of-living crisis, for backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and for mounting an ineffective opposition to Donald Trump’s attacks on workers and civil rights.To navigate the terrain of Congress effectively, including the inevitable conflicts with corporate-friendly Democrats and party leaders, socialists need their own congressional caucus.The Need for a Socialist CaucusMembers of Congress on both sides of the aisle have long recognized the utility of cooperating with ideologically like-minded legislators in smaller caucuses within the larger legislative parties. The Democrats’ three main ideological caucuses are the Blue Dogs, representing the right wing of the party; the New Democrat Coalition (NDC), representing a basically socially liberal but economically moderate faction; and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), representing the party’s left-leaning members.These caucuses are venues for legislators to formulate ideas and coordinate strategy. They can serve to advance particular priorities that don’t have the support of the broader party, or at least not yet. They also signal members’ broad alignment with distinct ideological currents within the broad Democratic tent.Sanders, Tlaib, and AOC are already members of the CPC, and Sanders himself helped found the caucus (along with late DSA member Ron Dellums and others) in 1991. So it may seem like the new socialist electeds are better off simply joining the CPC and attempting to advance their priorities that way.Yet that caucus long ago ceased to be an ideologically cohesive organization, let alone one that can be expected to fight for socialist legislative goals.As Jacobin contributor Neal Meyer has written, many CPC members have refused to back left-wing priorities like Medicare for All or reducing our country’s obscene military budget. And today, many CPC members are also members of the centrist, pro-business NDC. In fact, the incumbents ousted by DSA challengers this cycle — Adriano Espaillat, Diana DeGette, Shri Thanedar, and Jimmy Gomez — were members of the CPC.What a Caucus Can AchieveSo there’s a real role to be played by a new caucus that can cohere left-wing elected officials and continue efforts to build a socialist pole within the Democratic Party, expanding on the work that politicians like Sanders, AOC, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani have done already.In the short term, a socialist caucus may be able to make strategic interventions to advance its policy aims (and block bad policy). Here they might learn a thing or two from the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), the hard-right GOP caucus founded in 2015 that was instrumental in ousting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and replacing him with Mike Johnson.The Freedom Caucus has often played “legislative hardball” against its own party to try to push policy further right. Looking at the HFC experience, scholar of the GOP Paul Heideman writes, “The conditions in which socialist legislative hardball is most likely to be successful are those in which the Democratic Party has a majority in Congress and an opposite-party president.”That is the situation in which socialists will soon find themselves. In similar circumstances, the HFC was able to “use its size and discipline to compel the House leadership to enter into fights with the administration that it otherwise would have avoided” and “succeeded in winning more power for itself in the form of committee appointments and so on.” The very large congressional majority that Democrats just won, however, means that socialists will not be able to constitute a winning vote margin, which puts limits on their leverage.Heideman has also observed that the hardball strategy has often been counterproductive. Sometimes, when Freedom Caucus members refused to vote for legislation because it was insufficiently right-wing, Republican leadership was forced to seek Democratic votes to pass the legislation instead. As a result, the legislation ended up more liberal than it would have been otherwise. The HFC has in recent years seen its numbers and influence dwindle.The HFC experience reveals the limits of the power of a small minority of legislators. Especially if and when socialist lawmakers find themselves working under a Democratic president, they will need to be creative and strategic about how they approach fights with their own party.The efforts of the Squad — the informal grouping of young legislators including AOC, Tlaib, and others who are generally regarded as the leftmost members of the House — under the Biden administration are also instructive. In 2021, the Democrats were attempting to pass both a major infrastructure spending bill, which had broad congressional support, and Build Back Better (BBB), an expansive social welfare bill that was opposed by centrist Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. The CPC, including the Squad, argued that Democratic leadership should hold a vote on the two bills together, to use the infrastructure bill as leverage to convince the centrists to vote for BBB.Ultimately, party leaders decided to split the votes — holding a vote on the infrastructure bill first, then BBB — and convinced most of the CPC, but not the Squad, to go along. The result was predictable: the infrastructure law passed, and BBB did not. Only the socialists and a few progressive allies held the line until the end, insisting correctly that splitting up the votes would likely doom the welfare bill.That’s exactly the kind of principled tactical intervention a socialist caucus can help make.Of course, in many cases, as with the Squad’s stand for BBB, the socialist minority will lose out to moderates, especially because they can’t rely even on the support of most of the CPC. But as socialists continue to grow their numbers in Congress, they will have more weight to throw around.In any case, the congressional left can’t avoid conflicts with the rest of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by party moderates’ continued denunciations of socialism and the concerted efforts of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Third Way to discredit DSA and take down left-wing Democratic candidates.Building a Socialist PoleThat fact points to one of the longer-term reasons socialists would do well to form a caucus. Given the ideological divisions among the Democrats and the unavoidable fights to come with politicians to their right, socialist legislators need their own congressional organization, one that can articulate and keep its members cohered around a distinctive political vision.Even when the socialist left can’t prevail in intraparty conflicts, being able to communicate what socialists stand for to the broader public is indispensable. A caucus will allow the Left to point to the legislators who have a demonstrated commitment to their priorities, making the case for electing more socialists and building up the broader institutional forces that can support them, like the labor movement and DSA. It will allow the socialist left to distinguish itself from the unreliable “progressives” of the CPC and other caucuses, helping it to consolidate support among the electorate.The value of a caucus will be all the greater if, as seems likely, socialists keep winning elections, and the conflict heightens. Over the last decade, the socialist left has hotly debated how to relate to the Democratic Party: whether to try to win control of it, or form a third party immediately, or tactically exploit the Democratic ballot line with the eventual goal of forming a party of our own. For now, it seems undeniable that, in most places, running on the Democratic line is the surest way to build up our forces in Congress as well as state and local offices.Yet it is clear that many in the party see socialists as an existential threat, and that in the long run this house divided against itself will not stand. There will be a struggle between those who are fighting for greater redistribution of wealth and the democratization of political and economic power, on the one hand, and those who bitterly oppose that on the other. That struggle might result in the triumph of one group or the other, staying within the confines of the Democratic Party or producing a splintering into two or more parties. Whatever happens, socialists in Congress can only benefit from starting to organize themselves for that battle now.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.
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